Review by:

The Empire of Chance is about the history and current use of probability theory and statistics. The book provides a broad treatment of these topics; one could, accordingly, read or review it from quite a variety of different perspectives. Because this review is for psychologists, I will organize it around the book's insights into a question that I believe is at the heart of much malaise in psychological research: how has the virtually barren technique of hypothesis testing come to assume such importance in the process by which we arrive at our conclusions from our data? In what follows, I first describe why this question is timely and important. I then provide a brief synopsis of the book. And finally, I detail the book's answers to the question